For the record(s)

So Gapporin was the latest member of the DP forums to converge on the ol’ Greenhouse, all for a good cause – I was desperate to get rid of a good chunk of the ol’ record collection. The thing was, I had two rather sizeable boxes full of LPs, and a few singles, that I had been hauling around with me since I moved out of my parents’ house. These boxes basically encompassed my record collection, my brother’s, and my mom’s. So there’s quite a bizarre mix of stuff – Disney educational records, soundtracks (ranging from the Star Wars movies to a musical production of Cromwell with Alec Guinness [!!]), and any number of things in between, including Foghat Live (SLOW RIDE!), Kiss, and the Concert for Bangladesh. There’s probably some good stuff in there, but I’m already scrambling to archive VHS tapes to DVDs so I can toss the tapes to save space; I’m just not going to have the time to also do records-to-CDs at the same time, and the records were taking up a hell of a lot of space. So I hope he likes his haul – at the very least, for him, I hope it was worth ten bucks and the drive from Joplin and back. A lot of it may be trade bait for something much cooler, and I’m okay with that. The stuff I couldn’t part with, I kept, in a larger-than-I-really-wanted-it-to-be pile outside the ridiculously heavy box I handed off to him; I’m sure I’ll hear about that pile in due course.

Happy birthday to Flack, by the way – I’ve been talking to him quite a bit lately because I’ve been bitten by the book-writing bug. Actually I’m bitten by the book-writing bug fairly regularly, but I enjoyed “Commodork” so much that I’ve found myself asking “Is there a book I could write that Rob couldn’t just write himself?”, because Rob and I could each write a bunch of books on the same topics. Someone appeared out of the blue recently and suggested something to me that would indeed be a book that practically requires me to be the one to write it. I’m not going to tell you what it is just yet, because for pete’s sake, I need to research and write the thing, and then I need to get it published. But once you know what it’s about, you too will say “Yeah, that’s a book that only Earl would bother to write.” I know it’s a great idea to say “Hey! You know what? I think I’m suddenly going to start a major undertaking right before I have a baby to take care of!”, but this is something that will take some time. Like some time next year. But for all those who think I need to write a book, I’m working on it. Now it’ll just be a question of who in the world will want to read it.